View Only Unread Messages in a Gmail Inbox with 2 Simple Tricks

Gmail is an excellent mail client, but one feature that has always felt missing was a simple sorting ability to view only the unread email messages residing in an inbox. It turns out you can show only the unread messages with Gmail though, you just have to use either a simple search operator to reveal only unread messages, or use a different Inbox sorting method that displays unread emails first regardless of the message age. Using either method is very simple, so pick whichever is best for your situation.

This tutorial will show you two different approaches to easily view and see unread messages in Gmail.

How to Show Only Unread Messages in the Gmail Inbox with Search

This uses a search function within Gmail, making it temporary, and it does not change how the inbox functions or sorts messages beyond this task:

Log in to your Gmail.com as usual if you have not done so already

Click into the Gmail Search box at the top of the webmail screen, and then type the following exactly:

is:unread

Hit Return to sort the inbox by unread messages in the gmail inbox

If you have multiple boxes and want to see unread messages in the inbox, a slight variation of the above trick would be this Gmail search operator:

label: inbox, label: unread

The Gmail inbox will be sorted to only display messages that haven’t been read yet, this search operator is practically instantaneous regardless of how giant (or small) your unread mail count is.

Yes, this search tricks works on the web with any web browser, whether it’s Gmail in Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, or whatever else, in addition to the common mobile Gmail apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

You can also use the “label:unread” search parameter if that is easier to remember or works better for your needs than “is:unread”

View Unread Emails Only in Primary Gmail Inbox

If you use the default Gmail inbox filtering and you want to exclusively see only the unread emails in the “Primary” Gmail inbox, you can do that with the following search operator:

in: category:primary is:unread

That will display only the unread emails for the “Primary” inbox, rather than the entire inbox.

This is another significant advantage to webmail, since the task of sorting giant inboxes is handled by a remote server, it relieves the local machine of the disk and CPU intensive activity of sorting through potentially hundreds of thousands of past messages to find the 9000+ unread emails residing in the inbox. This screen shot example may be a bit extreme, but even my personal email has over 200+ unread messages at any given moment.

To reveal the normal inbox again with all read and unread messages together, either remove the search operator from the search box and hit return again, or just click the “Inbox” item from the left side menu.

Despite being such a simple feature, it doesn’t seem like common knowledge. I’ve been using Gmail for many years and didn’t know about this trick, and its as only in a passing conversation with a friend that I learned about it.

How to Change Gmail Inbox to Display Unread Email First

Another option goes beyond sorting and searching the inbox and actually prioritizes your Gmail inbox by message type, in this case, unread emails. With this enabled, all unread messages will appear on top of read messages, regardless of when either was sent. For example, an unread message from two weeks ago would appear above a read message from 10 minutes ago. Enabling this is really easy:

Go to Gmail Settings (Gear icon > Settings)

Choose the “Inbox” tab, then pull down the “Inbox type” menu and select “Unread First”

Unread messages will instantly sort to the top of the inbox, and the search operator will no longer be necessary unless you don’t want to see the read messages at all.

Either of these tricks are incredibly helpful for those of us who manage large inboxes, where new unread messages routinely get pushed off the front pages of the inbox, and inevitably end up buried several screens back with a bunch of already read mail. As we all know, once an email message ends up off the primary inbox screen, it’s pretty easy to forget about them, which only adds to the feeling of inbox overload when the unread count is reaching into the high numbers.

Now how do you “move” unread emails out of the Inbox? There’s an option to move to the Inbox except they’re already there. You can drag them to a different “label” but then they are marked as in the Inbox and in the other “label”.

Why gmail has to do everything in a different way than has always worked just boggles my mind.

This works for me… category:primary is:unread While in Gmail just type this into the Google Search bar…adjust primary to be social or what other tabs you have to organize your emails. This will only show the unread emails from that particular category in your inbox.

I used to have the unread emails at the top of my inbox. And somehow I accidentally go rid of it. So I couldn’t remember how I did it and came across this article. But it doesn’t seem to work. Has the software changed. I see the setting gear, but nothing that works.

Gmail is the same, you have to enable the features as described here. Also be sure to turn on the universal inbox and turn off the awful sorting thing that sticks messages into tabs like nobody wants. Do both.

Is there any way to get a view in the gmail mobile app that shows only unread emails?

Typing the search every time is very time consuming. In the desktop (online) version, I can setup a priority inbox to show unread first, starred next and everything else last… each in its own neat bucket.

After a lot of mooching around I can still find no way to group the unread mails other than by searching , which is so easy to back out of, requiring me to redo the search.

You cannot show ALL unread emails in inbox with the “Settings > Inbox > …”.
It works ONLY if the emails are _not filtered to go to a folder/”label”.
It will not show unread emails if they have a “label”.

Somewhere in time, I have 82 emails in my “Primary” Inbox. When I use the methods from this article, it brings up the thousands of emails in all three categories of “Primary”, “Social”, and “Promotions”. Is there a way to narrow it down to those 82? It’s driving me bonkers! Thank you.

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